Red Planet Blues

SEVENTEEN

Since the episode with Joshua Wilkins, I’d researched ways to kill a transfer, just to be on the safe side. Sadly, except for using a broadband disruptor, there didn’t seem to be any reliable method. That made sense, of course: the bodies were designed to cheat death—they were highly durable, with vital components encased in protective armor. I’d tried to find a way, but it seemed kryptonite was hard to come by on Mars.

Even so, Pickover made me leave my gun in a locker at the western airlock station—I guess he was afraid I might try to do him in once he’d shown me where the riches were located. He didn’t know I’d acquired a switchblade from Dirk, though, and he was too naïve to give me a pat-down before we headed out, so I kept that in my pocket.

My detective’s brain was hard at work trying to figure out precisely where he was taking me. First clue: we’d exited through the western airlock, and this was the one bit of information that couldn’t be misdirection for my sake, since it was where he’d parked his privately owned Mars buggy when he’d last returned from the Alpha.

Thank God Pickover had bought the buggy prior to transferring, because it was the expensive kind that had its own life-support system. If he’d been buying one today, he’d doubtless have opted for the cheaper—and more reliable—ones that simply provided transportation.

Pickover rented me a surface suit. He paid for it directly, since he would have ended up being expensed for it, anyway—but I didn’t have to wear it for the long drive, although he did make me put the fishbowl over my head. On Earth, that would have been uncomfortable—normally, the suit’s collar bore the weight of the helmet—but the thing wasn’t heavy enough here to be bothersome. Pickover did make it opaque, though, before we started tooling along.

A planitia is a low plain, and just like their counterparts on Earth, they tended to be nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. We chatted a bit at first, but having to listen to Rory’s voice echo in the fishbowl was unpleasant, and after a time we both fell silent. I confess I wiled away the hours thinking about Diana, Lacie, and Lakshmi, separately and in various permutations.

I possibly did doze on the trip—tough guy like me doesn’t often think about his childhood, but when my mom wanted me to sleep and I wouldn’t, she used to take me for a drive. Pickover had also made me leave my tablet computer and phone behind; I had no tools that might help me calculate our location. But by the time we got to where we were going, the sun was rising in the east. I’d been hoping it would be coming up over jagged peaks or broken crater walls that I could match to topographical maps, but the illuminated part of the horizon—and, as I saw as the sun climbed higher, the horizon all the way around—was just more smooth ground, with one exception: to the west, there was the crumbling wall of a small crater.

I used the buggy’s toilet then got into the rented surface suit—this one was kind of a drab olive green—and exited the vehicle. The buggy had springy wheels almost a meter across, and a boxy clear passenger cabin; the Martian atmosphere was tenuous enough that streamlining didn’t matter for surface vehicles.

Pickover went to the buggy’s trunk and pulled out a device that looked a bit like an upright vacuum cleaner with no bag attached.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A metal detector. I just got it yesterday.”

“I’d have thought those would be useless on Mars,” I said, “because of all the iron oxide in the soil.”

“Oh, it’s easy to tune metal detectors to ignore iron. But I did have a devil of a time finding one to rent. They’re of no help in fossil hunting, of course, and the standard uses for such things—beachcombing, searching for archeological artifacts, and so on—simply don’t apply here.”

He handed it to me.

I raised my eyebrows. “You want me to do the minesweeping?”

“I can’t,” Rory said. “I tried—but the metal in my body interferes too much with the detector. You, on the other hand…”

The guy was more clever than I’d given him credit for. He hadn’t brought me out here because I wanted to see the Alpha; he’d brought me out here because he needed the help of a biological.

He went back to the trunk and brought out another device: a tank of compressed gas with a flexible hose attached. “For blowing sand,” Rory said, evidently anticipating my question.

“Okay,” I said. “Show me where you found the first land mine.”

“This way. Follow in my footsteps precisely. I’ve used this path numerous times; it’s either free of land mines or they’ve all corroded like that one I brought to your office.”

He led, dust rising from his footfalls. I still found it bizarre to see a person in street clothes walking unprotected on Mars. Pickover was wearing what I imagined paleontologists wore back on Earth: brown work boots, heavy khaki pants, and a flannel work shirt. He’d also put on a baseball cap with the logo of the Toronto Blue Jays; I guess transfers needed something to keep the sun out of their eyes, too.

We headed out about fifty meters—I counted the paces—and came to an area that had been marked off into a grid of meter-wide squares by monofilament. The strands were almost exactly the same color as the red dust, and I mentioned that they were hard to see. “Not in the infrared,” Pickover replied. “I’m running a small current through them from that excimer pack, there. To me, they’re bright white, but the average prospector won’t notice them at all unless he trips over them.”

He stepped over one of the strands, and I gingerly did the same. We did this five more times and then stopped. “We’re still a ways from where the land mine went off,” he said crouching, “but let me show you this. It’s the spot where I found the counter slab for two-dash-thirteen-eighty-eight.”

“The fossils are lying right out on the surface?”

“Occasionally,” said Pickover, “but they’re usually a short distance down—but only a short distance. See, on Earth, sedimentary rocks have been forming for billions of years. But on Mars, sedimentation came to an end over three and a half billion years ago, when the open bodies of water dried up. So, instead of ancient sediments being deeply buried, they’re right on the surface—or just about. The water ice close to the surface here at the Alpha long ago either dissociated or sublimated, leaving eight or ten centimeters of loose, dry sand overtop of the ancient matrix. At the Alpha, that matrix is made out of areslithia—Mars stone. It’s really just sand and silt fused with water ice; the ground here is as much as sixty percent water ice by weight. Do you see what that means, Alex?”

I didn’t. “What?”

“Well, on Earth, most fossils are permineralized: the spaces in the original organic material have been filled in by minerals percolating through the ground; that new material replaces the original biological specimen, which ultimately disappears. But here at the Alpha, the fossils are the original material, simply embedded in the matrix. You can often get an Alpha fossil out of the matrix just by bringing the areslithia up to room temperature and letting the ice melt. That’s why the fossils from here at the Alpha are so good—they’re the actual ancient exoskeletons, unaltered, preserved in a dense slurry that’s been frozen solid for over three billion years.”

“Not completely, I bet. That land mine you brought in was corroded.”

Pickover nodded. “Yes, true. Something—maybe a micrometeoroid impact a couple of decades ago—heated a patch of the soil enough that there was a small pocket of running groundwater, and that’s what rusted out that mine. But most of the rest of this whole field”—he gestured expansively—“has been completely frozen since the Noachian.”

“But that counter slab you brought to my office was solid, even at room temperature.”

“Only because I’d infused it with a stabilizer, replacing the water content with thermoplastic.”

“Ah.”

He rose and continued walking. After about forty meters we came to a spot where there was a big divot out of the ground. “That’s where the mine that blew up was,” he said pointing. “And over there’s where I recovered that one that was rusted through.” He indicated a much smaller defect in the surface.

I began a slow minesweep of all 6,000 square meters of what Pickover had identified as the Alpha Deposit; he walked behind me.

While we walked along, I tried to commit landmarks to memory; this was my first time here at the Alpha, but I suspected it wouldn’t be my last, and knowing the terrain is halfway to winning a battle. Going right back to the first Viking landers, people had been giving whimsical names to various Martian boulders. Off to my left was a big one that looked like the kind of car I’d seen in 1950s movies—it even had a couple of fin-like projections; I mentally dubbed it “Plymouth.” And to my right was a head-shaped rock with craggy good looks; the old-movie buff in me felt “Hudson” was the perfect name for it.

It turned out the Alpha wasn’t surrounded by land mines—which, after all, would have required a lot of them. But there was an extant line of twelve, each about eight meters from the next, along the eastern perimeter of the Alpha; the one that had exploded, and the one that had rusted out, would have been two additional points along that line. I guess that meant New Klondike was indeed east of here, and Willem Van Dyke had assumed anyone out looking for the Alpha would come from that direction.

If this were an old battlefield, we’d just lob rocks at the remaining land mines and blow each of them up in turn. But that might damage precious fossils, and so instead we set about carefully clearing them. The mines were mostly buried under a couple of centimeters of dry sand. Rory used his blower at a shallow angle to remove the sand from on top of one of the mines, and sure enough, the deactivation hole was visible right in the middle of the disk. The hole was actually plugged with sand, which is something neither of us had anticipated but we both probably should have. But after a moment, a thought occurred to me. I had transferred the knife to the equipment pouch on my surface suit. I pulled it out.

“What’s that?”

“A switchblade, I said.

He frowned, clearly unhappy that I’d brought a weapon along. But I handed it to him, and showed him the button that caused the blade to spring out. He had better balance than me, better reflexes, and had already proven he could survive a land-mine explosion. And so he stood over the mine, one leg on either side of it, and he bent over, positioned the closed switchblade above the deactivation hole, and pressed the button.

The blade shot out, nicely slicing through the sand, and its tip must indeed have hit the button down below because a little mechanical flag on the top of the mine, near the center, flipped over from red to green—just as the material I’d read said it would.

Rory couldn’t let out a sigh of relief, but I could, and did. He then pried the mine up; it seemed stuck a bit in the permafrost beneath it, but it finally came free. We repeated the process eight meters farther along, deactivating and liberating another Caldera-7.

We could have continued on, deactivating all the other mines, but by this point I needed something to eat. And so we each picked up one of the deactivated mines and headed back toward the buggy; I’d bought some sandwiches from the little shop at the airlock station but needed to go inside the pressurized cabin so I could take off my fishbowl to eat them.

Before we did that, though, Pickover opened the buggy’s trunk again, and we put the deactivated mines inside; on the way back home, we’d find someplace to dispose of them. There were brown fabric sacks in the trunk; part of a paleontologist’s kit, I guessed. Pickover used some of them to make nests to carefully cushion the mines, just in case.

While he was doing that, I looked out at the area, which, to my eye, seemed no different from anywhere else on this part of Mars: endless orange plains under a yellow-brown sky, and—

Oh, Christ.

“Rory,” I said, over my helmet radio, “do you have telescopic vision?”

He closed the trunk, straightened, and faced me. “Sort of. I’ve got a twenty-to-one zoom built-in. It helps when working on fossils. Why?”

I pointed toward the horizon. “Is that what I think it is?”

I watched as he turned his gaze. Nothing happened on his face, making me wonder what mental command he used to access the zoom function. “Who could that be?” he asked.

Damn. So it was another Mars buggy, sitting out on the planitia. We’d been tailed through the dark, all the way here from New Klondike. Normally, I’d have spotted a tail almost at once, but I’d had this stupid polarized fishbowl over my noggin for the whole ride out.

And Pickover had made me leave my gun behind.